Papa Lazo's View

2011-12-28T20:51:00.002-05:00

2011-12-28T20:38:00.001-05:00

Says it all.

2011-12-22T14:40:00.002-05:00

2011-11-19T02:03:00.001-05:00

2011-11-16T00:58:00.001-05:00

Respecting our elders - an EXCELLENT PSA, from Greece (subtitled in English and French)

2011-08-10T11:59:00.001-05:00

2011-07-28T01:06:00.001-05:00

2011-07-28T01:01:00.001-05:00

2011-07-28T00:55:00.001-05:00

2011-07-16T02:07:00.000-05:00

2011-07-15T16:58:00.000-05:00

2011-07-15T11:57:00.002-05:00

2011-07-14T11:44:00.001-05:00

2011-07-14T10:23:00.001-05:00

2011-07-13T23:13:00.001-05:00

2011-07-13T23:06:00.001-05:00

2011-07-13T22:55:00.001-05:00

2011-07-13T22:20:00.001-05:00

RTK Me Shqiptaret e Turqise/Türkiye'deki Arnavutlar

2011-07-13T22:03:00.000-05:00

2011-06-03T09:25:00.002-05:00

2011-05-28T13:39:00.002-05:00

RAIL Magazine

2011-04-07T12:59:00.000-05:00

RAIL Magazine

the Economics of Happiness

2011-03-31T13:50:00.000-05:00

berko hicaz klarnet taksimi

2011-03-31T11:18:00.000-05:00

Alvanoi - Arvanites - Shqipetar - fustanella (Skai new documentary 1821)...

2011-03-22T17:12:00.000-05:00

Ylli Baka-Rashe E Theva Kemben

2011-03-22T00:59:00.000-05:00

Ylli Baka 2010

2011-03-20T23:50:00.000-05:00

Shpresim Zylbehari Vec nje Her, NEW 2010 , Shqip 2010 , Muzik Shqip 2010...

2011-03-20T23:22:00.000-05:00

2011-03-16T08:46:00.001-05:00

Kenge per Laver Bariun-Vaske Curri

2011-03-12T20:05:00.000-05:00

Merak qe s'me ike kurre - Eduart Dëma

2011-03-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

Epirus Folk: Ilia Basho & Thoma Loli - Lerma Vajzen

2011-02-27T23:15:00.000-05:00

Dasem ne Manastir.

2011-02-27T23:04:00.000-05:00

Dasem ne Manastir

2011-02-27T22:54:00.000-05:00

Philly Trolley Desire - My First Vid Ever!

2011-02-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

This is a photo-montage/music video project I just did, starring my beloved PCC trolleys in Philly along Girard Avenue. Hope you likey. Music by Maxwell.

Bertan Asllani

2011-02-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

Angry Birds Peace Treaty

2011-02-15T12:32:00.000-05:00

Gjon Muharremaj-Gjysem finale-Albanians Got Talent 2010

2011-02-15T10:26:00.000-05:00

INCREDIBLE.

Korab Shaqiri - Vetmia ( Official Video ) HD

2011-02-14T23:58:00.000-05:00

KONAKU - VIOLETA KUKAJ

2011-02-14T23:43:00.000-05:00

Nadi Matoshi - Nuk mund të haroj

2011-02-14T23:20:00.000-05:00

Nadi - Mori Fund

2011-02-14T23:18:00.000-05:00

Στράτος Διονυσίου- Ένα Λεπτό Περιπτερά

2011-01-27T00:48:00.000-05:00

Στράτος Διονυσίου - Υποκρίνεσαι

2011-01-27T00:45:00.000-05:00

Marina Blaxaki-Dionysiou (Kratise me) mp3

2011-01-27T00:42:00.000-05:00

RIGHT ON, EGYPT!!! PUSH THE KILLER MUBARAK OUT OF EGYPT FOR GOOD!!!

2011-01-26T17:09:00.013-05:00

RIGHT ON, EGYPTIANS!!! JUST GO FOR IT!!! FOLLOW TUNISIA'S LEAD AND GET THIS PARTY STARTED - FINALLY!!!

Take the power into your own hands - it is yours, and you deserve to be rid of the Mubarak regime once and for all!!! I am embarrassed to hear Hillary Clinton lecturing us on how stable the Egyptian government is. I am sickened to know the extent to which our political leaders in America and Europe have propped up the Fascist Mubarak regime only to appease the Fascist Israeli regime and its gigantic lobby here in America. Believe me when I say the majority of Americans couldn't be happier to see you doing what you are doing. You are right to do it, you have the AMERICAN PEOPLE on YOUR SIDE. Our government has done nothing but capitulate to fascistic business interests in Big Oil and Big Auto since the creation of Israel, which has served as a beachhead for European and American ambitions in the Middle East. Shame!!!

Arab brothers and sisters - religious and non-religious, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Atheist, every single critique Hillary Clinton leveled at the Arab world is applicable here at home in the US for us. Our country is overrun by ignorant, autocratic, theocratic fascists at the pinnacle of power in business and government. They have used every trick in the book to block meaningful reform here at home. Look at how they have treated our own President since his inauguration!

Earth to Hillary: Let's sweep in front of our own door before we lecture the Arabs. You want to see dangerous levels of poverty which are an invitation to religious fundamentalists and societal collapse? Take hold of your senses, dear lady: visit North Philadelphia and see the same dire conditions you condemn in the Arab world:

Hillary said that in the Middle East, poverty and a lack of education are a huge vacuum which religious extremism fills and she ignores the glaring fact that right here in the US of A, we have legions of Evangelical politicians and business leaders and media moguls who have used their power and financial might to revise textbooks in schools, tamper with science, inhibit research, exploit our military might in the name of their religious aspirations, and have utterly destroyed the fabric of civil society. Our cities are crumbling, our poor are poorer than ever, and every single day I see more homeless on the streets of NYC. We have become a shadow of what our forefathers would have wanted in the name of the Almighty Dollar and we have ourselves to blame for letting it happen.

Listen to your hearts, use your minds. You are the heirs to an ancient, noble civilization and nobody and nothing can take that away from you. Our thoughts and our aspirations for freedom and civility in America are joined to yours, brothers and sisters - fellow HUMAN BEINGS!!!

Mubarak out of Egypt!, Netanyahu out of Israe!!! END ALL US AID TO ISRAEL AND EGYPT!!! Long live all freedom-loving people - religious or non-religious - who struggle for their human rights. SHAME on anyone who would stand between a citizen and his dignity as a human being, including all those in seats of civil authority here in the US! Stop the hypocrisy Hillary - it's too painful to bear. We all know the truth now, and we didn't need Wikileaks to tell us.

2011-01-26T10:08:00.001-05:00

2011-01-26T09:52:00.000-05:00

Fotografi - Devis Xherahu

2011-01-24T16:01:00.001-05:00

2011-01-24T02:15:00.001-05:00

Kthehu Vetem Ti-Anila Lilaj

2011-01-18T01:42:00.001-05:00

Te postuar ne YouTube veterineri123

Doukissa, Always in Our Hearts

2010-11-23T09:16:00.005-05:00

We lost Doukissa this past September. She was one of Greece's most beloved singers, well-known also to many Albanians and Albanian-Americans acquainted with Greek popular music. She was a dear woman whom I had the great pleasure of meeting and thanking for her beautiful songs and the joy they bring me. She autographed the record album I had brought with me to a concert she gave in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1985 or 1986. I attended it with my parents, and we danced the night away, with carnations and roses flying over us from every direction to Doukissa, who sang as we danced around her, like in the clip below. The floor was full of flowers and dollars, and I remember I kept slipping as I danced! It was a great time with mum and dad, that night.

There are some singers out there whose music holds us and never lets us go. For me, Doukissa is one of those singers, and I will always remember her with love. May her memory be eternal.

Sto Fili Sou Tsipouraki

Clipman2008

Osa Ekana Yia 'Sena

Posted on YouTube by VasilisStuttgart

Kambana

Posted on YouTube by JackBershon

Matokladha Vregmena

Posted on YouTube by DJamadeusgr

Kaba - Thoma Loli dhe Luani

2010-10-28T00:04:00.002-05:00

Posted on YouTube by iliascameraman

Posted on YouTube by iliascameraman

Ilia Basho - Dasëm në Selanik

2010-10-27T23:34:00.002-05:00

What the Law States about Electioneering on Tax-Exempt Church Property

2010-10-25T17:28:00.000-05:00

Due to misinformation spread by advocates of church-based electioneering, some clergy are confused about federal tax law and how it impacts political activity in houses of worship. For example, some religious leaders might wonder what constitutes an endorsement of a candidate. Prohibited activities include letters of endorsement printed on the letterhead of the church, synagogue, temple or mosque. Distribution of campaign literature, pulpit endorsements of candidates, display of campaign signs on religiously owned property and other similar activities also clearly indicate partisan involvement in an election. (It should be noted, however, that clergy may endorse candidates as individuals in forums outside the church or work on behalf of candidates during their personal time.)

Penalties for violating federal law include loss of tax-exempt status or financial penalties imposed on officials of the house of worship in question. This is more than a theoretical concern; the IRS does enforce the law in this area. The Church at Pierce Creek near Binghamton, N.Y., lost its tax-exempt status in 1995 after the IRS determined it had violated federal tax law by publishing a full-page ad in USA Todayin late October of 1992 advising people that voting for presidential candidate Bill Clinton was a sin and soliciting tax-exempt donations to defray the cost of the ad. The church sued in federal court to regain its tax-exempt status, but a federal appellate court ruled unanimously that the IRS had the authority to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status.

Le Blog d'Ardi Vrenezi/Ardi Vrenezi's Blog

2010-10-25T00:24:00.004-05:00

Cliquer sur le lien ci-dessus afin de rejoindre le blog de Ardi Vrenezi, un jeune homme polyhandicapé kosovar, expulsé illégalement de la France et dont les jours sont maintenant en danger/Click on the link above to access the blog of Ardi Vrenezi, a young, severely handicapped Kosovar, illegally deported from France, who is now in mortal danger

A fabulous new Scandinavian Cookbook by Chef René Redzepi, of Copenhagen (From The Atlantic, courtesy of a dear friend)

2010-10-24T18:01:00.003-05:00

Click on the headline above to read about Chef René Redzepi of Denmark, whose new cookbook has been written up in The Atlantic.

Dasëm në Athinë/ Wedding in Athens, nga/by Vasil TANUSHA

2010-10-24T17:20:00.006-05:00

Stumbled upon these by accident, had to share with family and friends who remember the old ways. They're still alive and well in the old country, even if we only know about them through stories our parents and grandparents told us. A traditional Albanian family's wedding celebration, in Athens, brilliantly documented by Vasil Tanusha Video (cameramontazhe)

Part One/Pjesa e pare

Part Two/Pjesa e dyte

Pa Ty - Merita Bunjaku

2010-10-24T16:58:00.000-05:00

Zanatin se ke harru - Mimoza Shkodra

2010-10-24T16:53:00.002-05:00

Candidate for County Sheriff Campaigns at Local Greek Orthodox Church Festival, Violates US Constitution, Imperils GOARCH, OCA's Tax Exempt Status

2010-10-24T16:09:00.010-05:00

By Papa Lazo

Recently, Saint George Greek Orthodox Church on Valley Road, in Clifton, New Jersey had its annual fall festival. An entire table-full of us had shown up. We were looking forward to enjoying some lamb shank, moussaka, mezedakia, and salad - prepared by some of the best Greek and Greek-American restaurateurs in North Jersey. We were to wash it down with fine, dry Greek red wine, music and dancing. We were looking forward to dancing to syrta, tsamika, and kalamatiana (our favorite dances). We knew we would inevitably have to negotiate that vain man who comes to every single Greek church festival in North Jersey, and loves nothing more than standing on his head on the dance floor...to draw attention to himself.... "Look, I can stand on my head!"

Before the band went on this year, however, a group of somber-looking, conservative local politicians filed onto the stage. A special announcement was made that Republican Candidate for Passaic County Sheriff, Felix Garcia, was to give a speech. He was preceded onstage by two other speakers, both passionate supporters of Mr. Garcia. When Mr. Garcia took to the stage, he 'thanked God' that he lived in the country he lived in, which is giving him the opportunity to serve as Sheriff. That he was confident that with the support of those gathered, the tide could be turned in his favor.

At my table, there was dead silence. We looked at one another in disbelief. Had we just witnessed what we thought we'd just witnessed?

Had Mr. Garcia, Republican candidate for Sheriff, whom we all knew to be backed by socially and religiously conservative people, some of them Tea Party activists who have no connection to Passaic County whatsoever, flagrantly violated the constitutional separation of church and state, right in front of everyone’s noses?

Mr. Garcia not only gave his little campaign speech on-stage at a tax-exempt church property overseen by the Greek Orthodox Church of America, but when his discourse was over, his cohorts and he then vigorously worked the crowd, shaking hands, kissing babies, and shamelessly distributing campaign literature. It was crystal clear to those of us assembled at our table - and several tables in our immediate vicinity - that not only did Garcia not care a whit about violating the separation of church and state, but sadly, even those in a decision-making capacity at Saint George’s itself were either terribly, dangerously naïve, or had also decided to thumb their nose at the Constitution.

Though we were born into, baptized and raised in the Orthodox Church, many of us do not consider ourselves socially or religiously conservative. We continue to attend liturgy on occasion, but most of us had stopped attending church a long time ago. Nevertheless, we all enjoy celebrating our ethnic and cultural heritage, and up until this past Festival, never questioned whether our donations to our home parishes in the Greek Orthodox Church of America (and the Orthodox Church of America) were potentially being funneled into dubious political activities or causes.

With Mr. Garcia’s campaign appearance at Saint George’s Festival - and similar recent engagements by other conservative politicians at GOARCH and OCA parishes throughout the Northeast, however, many of us are in the process of reconsidering not just our membership dues, but pursuing this matter through the courts. We are all children or grandchildren of Greek, Albanian, Vlah, and Syrian Orthodox Christian immigrants who mastered not just the English language. In many cases, these brave immigrants mastered several other languages – often without a formal education. Several of us are also fully bilingual, if not trilingual. We are more comfortable showing our patriotism through a quiet resolve to live in accordance with our highest values as human beings. While we deeply respect, honor and promulgate a love and commitment to our own respective ethnic roots and religious traditions, we see ourselves as Americans first and foremost. Our parents and grandparents are proud to be a part of a country with a separation of Church and State, where all are free to believe – or not. We’re not big on conspicuous, brash displays of patriotism and nationalism, because it is encoded in our genes that these things carry within them the potential to do irreversible damage.

We don’t need flag-pins, and we’d rather sip our tea with our friends and family, instead of throwing it in each other’s faces. So we’re not coming at this from the standpoint of xenophobic, anti-immigrant haters.

We’re coming at this as connectors and citizens who have a deep, abiding love for America, as well as a militant commitment to social justice. We simply feel that Mr. Garcia, a candidate for Passaic County Sheriff (!) does not ‘get it’. His poor command of the English language and highly conservative religious and social views appear to preclude him from fully comprehending the importance of what the Constitution says about the separation of Church and State.

That Garcia brazenly invokes the Creator in the context of a political speech, on tax-exempt church property, and claims to have many powerful allies in Law Enforcement shows a certain belligerence, contempt, and lack of regard for the spirit of pluralism upon which the US was built. A concept that our grandparents and parents, without exception, understood far better than Mr. Garcia, having themselves fled from war, anarchy, empire and dictatorship in Europe and the Near East in the last century.

It is our opinion that, based solely on Mr. Garcia’s campaign activities at Saint George’s Greek Orthodox Church, a tax-exempt religious property, he has already indicated a willingness to flout the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America.

It is time for the public to escalate its alertness level and hold people like Mr. Garcia accountable. That he is even a serious candidate for this high office may be an indication of a complete lack of knowledge of the US Constitution and the separation of Church and State by both himself and an alarmingly large number of potential voters in Passaic County.

More chillingly, however, it could be an indication that a man who is running to be the head of law enforcement is driven and funded by a religiously and socially conservative agenda designed to chip away at and undo our Constitutionally-protected separation of Church and State, by any means necessary, tax-exempt status notwithstanding.

Mr. Garcia clearly demonstrated to many of us who were assembled at Saint George's Greek Orthodox Church's festival that he may, sadly, fall into the latter category, and therefore, in our opinion, he is patently unfit for office.

DANCE DANCE DANCE!!!!!

2010-10-24T16:00:00.000-05:00

Dimitris Mitropanos - S'agapo akoma

2010-10-24T14:13:00.000-05:00

Republicans Fight to Block All of Obamas Rail Infrastructure Initiatives

2010-10-04T21:56:00.003-05:00

The Republican Party of the USA is now a far more clear and present danger to the welfare and prosperity of the American people than it has ever been.

When confronted, the Republicans complaining about the pricetag of and blocking the upgrading our nation's rail system to a 21st Century network have nothing to say about the inestimable price of the blood our sons and daughters have spilt for Big Oil, Big Auto and the almighty Military Industrial Complex.

They have nothing to say about the incalculable amount of barrels of American blood paid for their murderous lies to us.

When we ponder the trilions and trillions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for roadways in the US - roadways which directly benefit Big Oil, and Big Auto, and enslave every single car-centric American commuter to a lifetime of owning, maintaining, insuring, replacing and fueling their cars - to the tune of $250,000 per person;

When we see Dick Cheney, in 2005, creating a loophole in environmental legislation permitting Halliburton to rip up our sacred land from Arkansas to Colorado, (and now grabbing up every swathe of territory stretching from Virginia to the Southern tier of New York State in order to extract natural gas through fracking), or arranging for Halliburton and Blackwater to take care of certain crucial aspects of rebuilding and securing Iraqi and Afghani infrastructure;

We know where the biggest danger lies. We know who the biggest threats to our national security are. We know who public enemy number one are.

Remember their words, America.

Remember their actions.

Remember their seething hatred of our democratically-elected President

...of us

...of democracy itself.

Remember the way they have fought and successfully blocked almost every single initiative we elected our President to carry out.

Remember these things.

And then, in November, let's vote every single one of these patently seditious men and women out of office so we can get on with the business of remaking our country into the seriously competitive 21st century, world-class economy and society it so richly deserves to be.

Please read the article pasted in below, or click the headline above to reach the New York Times for the original.

Plan to Expand Rail Service Imperiled at State Level

By MICHAEL COOPER, New York Times

Republicans running for governor in a handful of states could block, or significantly delay, one of President Obama’s signature initiatives: his plan to expand the passenger rail system and to develop the nation’s first bullet-train service.

In his State of the Union address this year, the president called for building high-speed rail, and backed up his words with $8 billion in stimulus money, distributed to various states, for rail projects.

But Republican candidates for governor in some of the states that won the biggest stimulus rail awards are reaching for the emergency brake.

In Wisconsin, which got more than $810 million in federal stimulus money to build a train linebetween Milwaukee and Madison, Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive and Republican candidate for governor, has made his opposition to the project central to his campaign.

Mr. Walker, who worries that the state could be required to spend $7 million to $10 million a year to operate the trains once the line is built, started a Web site, NoTrain.com, and has run a television advertisement in which he calls the rail project a boondoggle. “I’m Scott Walker,” he says in the advertisement, “and if I’m elected as your next governor, we’ll stop this train.”

Similar concerns are threatening to stall many of the nation’s biggest train projects. In Ohio, the Republican candidate for governor, John Kasich, is vowing to kill a $400 million federal stimulus project to link Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati by rail. In Florida, Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor, has questioned whether the state should invest in the planned rail line from Orlando to Tampa. The state got $1.25 billion in federal stimulus money for the project, but it will cost at least twice that much to complete.

And the nation’s most ambitious high-speed rail project, California’s $45 billion plan to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with trains that would go up to 220 miles per hour, could be delayed if Meg Whitman, a Republican, is elected governor. “In the face of the state’s current fiscal crisis, Meg doesn’t believe we can afford the costs associated with new high-speed rail at this time,” said Tucker Bounds, a campaign spokesman.

Ms. Whitman’s desire to delay the project, which has already received $2.25 billion in stimulus money, drew a rebuke from the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican who champions high-speed rail. “To say ‘now is not the time’ shows a very narrow vision,” said Matt David, the governor’s communications director.

The state-level opposition is a reminder of the challenge of building a national transportation project in the United States: while the federal government can set priorities, the construction is up to the states.

With recent polls showing all of the anti-rail Republican candidates leading or within striking distance of their pro-rail Democratic rivals, it is possible they could be elected and try to stop the train projects.

Federal officials, meanwhile, are incredulous that candidates are threatening to spurn stimulus money that their states competed ferociously to win just a year ago.

“The bottom line is that high-speed rail is a national program that will connect the country, spur economic development and bring manufacturing jobs to the U.S.,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman, said in a statement. “It will also transform transportation in America, much like the Interstate highway system did underPresident Eisenhower. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened to states like Ohio and Wisconsin if their leaders had decided they didn’t want to be connected to the rest of the country back then.”

Several candidates said they wanted to spend the stimulus rail money on roads and bridges, but it is unlikely they would be able to do so without changing the law: the stimulus, which included $28 billion for roads and bridges, required that the $8 billion for rail projects be spent on rail projects.

Federal officials declined to speculate on what would happen if anti-rail candidates were to win. But states that turn down rail money would probably have to return it to the federal government, which could then award it to states that want it.

Building a real high-speed rail network, like the ones expanding in Europe and Asia, is costly. The Acela trains between Boston and Washington can reach 150 m.p.h., but average around half that on their curvy, busy tracks.

That corridor, the most heavily used in the country, was largely shut out of the stimulus money; last week Amtrak outlined a $117 billion proposal to make it a true high-speed line.

The Obama administration used the rail stimulus money to make down payments on the high-speed lines in Florida and California and to build conventional rail service in other states.

The administration’s hope is that these rail lines will develop into networks that connect more cities, and that future investment can speed the trains. But critics question who will ride the new, not very fast trains.

The train proposed in Ohio would reach only 79 m.p.h. Estimates have suggested that some trips, with stops factored in, could average 39 m.p.h. Federal officials say the trains would be faster, but the number has stuck: in a recent debate Mr. Kasich, the Republican candidate, vowed that if he is elected governor, “the 39 mile-an-hour high-speed passenger train is dead.”

Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat seeking re-election, looked flabbergasted that anyone would turn down a $400 million construction project, fully financed by the federal government, to link the state’s biggest cities. “Your position, quite frankly, really puzzles me,” he responded at the debate.

Mr. Walker, the candidate in Wisconsin, said in an interview that he doubted many people would ride the train between Milwaukee and Madison. He said that it would be more expensive than a car trip without saving much time, and added that he worried about having to provide an annual subsidy to run the train.

In Florida, Bettina Inclán, a spokeswoman for Mr. Scott, the Republican candidate, noted that the state already paid to operate a commuter rail system and added that “we cannot afford to be subsidizing the bullet train as well.”

All Republicans are not against trains. One prominent rail advocate, John Robert Smith, was a four-term Republican mayor of Meridian, Miss.

“Any notion that somehow rail is subsidized, and other modes of transportation aren’t, is simply not factual,” said Mr. Smith, the president Reconnecting America, a nonprofit transportation advocacy group, who noted that highways and airports were subsidized as well. “Honestly, transportation infrastructure should not be a partisan issue. When you talk about good transportation solutions, they cross party lines.”

HBO Documentary Films: Gasland Trailer (HBO)

2010-09-23T10:06:00.000-05:00

"It's amazing that what took Mother Nature millions of years to build can be destroyed in a few hours with a piece of heavy machinery."

2010-09-23T09:40:00.002-05:00

SEE GASLANDS ON HBO - GET INVOLVED BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE:

http://gaslandthemovie.com/

OLMAZ CANIM! (Kurrë Xhanëm!) (Never my dear!) Azeri Kızı Günel

2010-09-21T21:26:00.001-05:00

Warda In Kuwait 2010 / في يوم وليلة

2010-09-21T21:08:00.000-05:00

Warda In Kuwait 2010 / أكدب عليك

2010-09-21T21:07:00.000-05:00

Echterouni / Warda 1973 إشتروني / وردة

2010-09-21T20:59:00.000-05:00

Labinot Tahiri LABI - Vuaj Une qe Faj nuk pata (new2010)

2010-09-19T21:51:00.000-05:00

Yiannis Katevas - Potpouri of Popular Dances (Nisiotika)

2010-09-19T13:08:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite artists from Greece, and a wonderful man, now living amongst us and entertaining us in North America. How fortunate we are!

Thoma Loli - Katjushka

2010-09-19T13:07:00.000-05:00

Shqiptaret e Amerikes dhe kultura kombetare shqiptare ne Mal te Zi

2010-09-19T12:53:00.000-05:00

L'Shana Tovah - שנה טובה

2010-09-11T17:35:00.002-05:00

Eid is an American Holiday, Too - A Blessed Eid - Gëzuar Bajramin - Bayram kutlu olsun - عید مُبارک - عيد مبارك

2010-09-10T10:17:00.012-05:00

Posted on YouTube by Gjirokastra2008

A quote from Thomas Jefferson, who when asked why, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (the basis for the Bill of Rights), the name "Jesus Christ" was not inserted before the phrase 'the Holy author of our religion', at the beginning of the Statute, responded thus: (This insertion) 'was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination."

(Yup, that just about covers everyone, doesn't it? The United States of America is your land, and my land. A simple, powerful prayer/affirmation for believers and non-believers alike - 'Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.')

PEACE: Gëzuar Bajramin - Bayram kutlu olsun - عید مُبارک - عيد مبارك -Bassam Saba & The New York Arabic Orchestra

2010-09-10T10:13:00.002-05:00

From NYarabicorchestra on YouTube

PEACE: Moroccan Vocalist, American Musicians, Arabic Music and Cultural Exchange

2010-09-10T10:07:00.001-05:00

From moroccotv, on YouTube

PEACE: Wishes for a blessed Eid to America's Muslims, and to Muslims Around the World - Gëzuar Bajramin - Bayram kutlu olsun - عید مُبارک - عيد مبارك

2010-09-10T09:49:00.007-05:00

The Healers of 9/11 - By Nicholas D. Kristof, NY Times, 9/10/10

2010-09-10T00:58:00.002-05:00

This weekend, a Jewish woman who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks is planning to speak at a mosque in Boston. She will be trying to recruit members of the mosque to join her battle against poverty and illiteracy in Afghanistan.

The woman, Susan Retik, has pursued perhaps the most unexpected and inspiring American response to the 9/11 attacks. This anniversary of Sept. 11 feels a little ugly to me, with some planning to remember the day with hatred and a Koran-burning — and that makes her work all the more exhilarating.

In the shattering aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Retik bonded with another woman, Patti Quigley, whose husband had also died in the attack. They lived near each other, and both were pregnant with babies who would never see their fathers.

Devastated themselves, they realized that there were more than half a million widows in Afghanistan — and then, with war, there would be even more. Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley also saw that Afghan widows could be a stabilizing force in that country.

So at a time when the American government reacted to the horror of 9/11 mostly with missiles and bombs, detentions and waterboardings, Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley turned to education and poverty-alleviation projects — in the very country that had incubated a plot that had pulverized their lives.

The organization they started, Beyond the 11th, has now assisted more than 1,000 Afghan widows in starting tiny businesses. It’s an effort both to help some of the world’s neediest people and to fight back at the distrust, hatred and unemployment that sustain the Taliban.

“More jobs mean less violence,” Ms. Retik noted. “It would be naïve to think that we can change the country, but change has to start somewhere. If we can provide a skill for a woman so that she can provide for her family going forward, then that’s one person or five people who will have a roof over their head, food in their bellies and a chance for education.”

In times of fear and darkness, we tend to suppress the better angels of our nature. Instead, these women unleashed theirs.

Paul Barker, who for many years ran CARE’s operations in Afghanistan, believes America would have accomplished more there if our government had shared the two women’s passion for education and development. “I can only wonder at what a different world it could be today if in those fateful months after 9/11 our nation’s leadership had been guided more by a people-to-people vision of building both metaphorical and physical bridges,” Mr. Barker said.

A terrific documentary, “Beyond Belief,” follows Ms. Retik and Ms. Quigley as they raise funds for Afghan widows and finally travel to Afghanistan to visit the women they had been helping. Ms. Quigley has since stepped down from Beyond the 11th because she felt in danger of becoming a perpetual 9/11 poster widow, but she still is working on a series of Afghan initiatives. Ms. Retik, who has since remarried, remains focused on the charity.

Beyond the 11th began by buying small chicken flocks for widows so that they could sell eggs. Another major project was to build a women’s center in the city of Bamian, where the women weave carpets for export. The center, overseen by an aid group called Arzu, also offers literacy classes and operates a bakery as a business.

Another initiative has been to train Afghan women, through a group called Business Council for Peace, to run a soccer ball manufacturing company. The bosses have been coached in quality control, inventory management and other skills, and they have recruited unemployed widows to stitch the balls — which are beginning to be exported under the brand Dosti.

Ms. Retik’s next step will be to sponsor a microfinance program through CARE. There are also plans to train attendants to help reduce deaths in childbirth.

Will all of this turn Afghanistan into a peaceful country? Of course not. Education and employment are not panaceas. But the record suggests that schools and economic initiatives do tend over time to chip away at fundamentalism — and they’re also cheap.

All the work that Beyond the 11th has done in Afghanistan over nine years has cost less than keeping a single American soldier in Afghanistan for eight months.

I admire Ms. Retik’s work partly because she offers an antidote to the pusillanimous anti-Islamic hysteria that clouds this anniversary of 9/11. Ms. Retik offers an alternative vision by reaching out to a mosque and working with Muslims so that in the future there will be fewer widows either here or there.

Her work is an invigorating struggle to unite all faiths against those common enemies of humanity, ignorance and poverty — reflecting the moral and mental toughness that truly can chip away at terrorism.

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

(Click on headline for link to original article in today's Times)

Condeming Homosexuals to Death and Burning Qur'ans on 9/11 = NO MORE TAX EXEMPTION FOR DOVE MINISTRIES!

2010-09-09T16:32:00.003-05:00

Please watch the video in the link above to better understand what Dove's 'ministry' is all about.

"Burn the Koran" Pastor Held Anti-Gay Therapy in Germany

2010-09-09T16:21:00.001-05:00

For Thomas Jefferson, The 'Pastor Jones' Quandary Wasn't A Quandary At All:

2010-09-09T14:01:00.012-05:00

"If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than as if it had happened in a fair or market." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:548

I wondered what Thomas Jefferson would have had to say about the seditious, anti-American Ayatollah-for-Jesus, 'Pastor' Jones, his Gainesville Christian Terrorist Brigade, and their plans to burn the Holy Qur'an on 9/11, thereby putting thousands of American troops directly into harm's way, and threatening to undo virtually all of the hard work our brave President has done to build bridges and end the hostilities in which we are embroiled.

I Googled and found the aforementioned quote, which speaks quite eloquently to this madness. Please forward it as widely as you can. I've cut and pasted the quotes below from the University of Virginia's website (click on the headline above to access original page). For the above quote and other prescient Jeffersonian quotes, please read below, or click on the headline above to access UV's original page.

"We have solved, by fair experiment, the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to the laws. And we have experienced the quiet as well as the comfort which results from leaving every one to profess freely and openly those principles of religion which are the inductions of his own reason and the serious convictions of his own inquiries." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to Virginia Baptists, 1808. ME 16:320
"The constitutional freedom of religion [is] the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights." --Thomas Jefferson: Virginia Board of Visitors Minutes, 1819. ME 19:416
"Among the most inestimable of our blessings, also, is that... of liberty to worship our Creator in the way we think most agreeable to His will; a liberty deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to John Thomas et al., 1807. ME 16:291
"In our early struggles for liberty, religious freedom could not fail to become a primary object." --Thomas Jefferson to Baltimore Baptists, 1808. ME 16:317
"Religion, as well as reason, confirms the soundness of those principles on which our government has been founded and its rights asserted." --Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:283
"One of the amendments to the Constitution... expressly declares that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,' thereby guarding in the same sentence and under the same words, the freedom of religion, of speech, and of the press; insomuch that whatever violates either throws down the sanctuary which covers the others." --Thomas Jefferson: Draft Kentucky Resolutions, 1798. ME 17:382
"The rights [to religious freedom] are of the natural rights of mankind, and... if any act shall be... passed to repeal [an act granting those rights] or to narrow its operation, such act will be an infringement of natural right." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. (*) ME 2:303, Papers 2:546
The Private Nature of Religion
"I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we were accountable to Him, and not to the priests." --Thomas Jefferson to Mrs. M. Harrison Smith, 1816. ME 15:60
"From the dissensions among Sects themselves arise necessarily a right of choosing and necessity of deliberating to which we will conform. But if we choose for ourselves, we must allow others to choose also, and so reciprocally, this establishes religious liberty." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:545
"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.
"I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Dowse, 1803. ME 10:378
"Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to God alone. I inquire after no man's, and trouble none with mine." --Thomas Jefferson to Miles King, 1814. ME 14:198
Government Intermeddling in Religion
"I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises. This results not only from the provision that no law shall be made respecting the establishment or free exercise of religion, but from that also which reserves to the states the powers not delegated to the United States. Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise or to assume authority in religious discipline has been delegated to the General Government. It must then rest with the states, as far as it can be in any human authority." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:428
"In matters of religion, I have considered that its free exercise is placed by the Constitution independent of the powers of the general government. I have therefore undertaken on no occasion to prescribe the religious exercises suited to it; but have left them as the Constitution found them, under the direction and discipline of State or Church authorities acknowledged by the several religious societies." --Thomas Jefferson: 2nd Inaugural Address, 1805. ME 3:378
"Our Constitution... has not left the religion of its citizens under the power of its public functionaries, were it possible that any of these should consider a conquest over the consciences of men either attainable or applicable to any desirable purpose." --Thomas Jefferson: Reply to New London Methodists, 1809. ME 16:332
"I do not believe it is for the interest of religion to invite the civil magistrate to direct its exercises, its discipline, or its doctrines; nor of the religious societies, that the General Government should be invested with the power of effecting any uniformity of time or matter among them. Fasting and prayer are religious exercises. The enjoining them, an act of discipline. Every religious society has a right to determine for itself the times for these exercises and the objects proper for them according to their own particular tenets; and this right can never be safer than in their own hands where the Constitution has deposited it... Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:429
"To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers 2: 546
"It is... proposed that I should recommend, not prescribe, a day of fasting and prayer. That is, that I should indirectly assume to the United States an authority over religious exercises which the Constitution has directly precluded them from. It must be meant, too, that this recommendation is to carry some authority and to be sanctioned by some penalty on those who disregard it; not indeed of fine and imprisonment, but of some degree of proscription, perhaps in public opinion. And does the change in the nature of the penalty make the recommendation less a law of conduct for those to whom it is directed?... Civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Miller, 1808. ME 11:428
Religion Intermeddling in Government
"Whenever... preachers, instead of a lesson in religion, put [their congregation] off with a discourse on the Copernican system, on chemical affinities, on the construction of government, or the characters or conduct of those administering it, it is a breach of contract, depriving their audience of the kind of service for which they are salaried, and giving them, instead of it, what they did not want, or, if wanted, would rather seek from better sources in that particular art of science." --Thomas Jefferson to P. H. Wendover, 1815. ME 14:281
"Ministers of the Gospel are excluded [from serving as Visitors of the county Elementary Schools] to avoid jealousy from the other sects, were the public education committed to the ministers of a particular one; and with more reason than in the case of their exclusion from the legislative and executive functions." --Thomas Jefferson: Note to Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:419
"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination." --Thomas Jefferson: Elementary School Act, 1817. ME 17:425
"I do not know that it is a duty to disturb by missionaries the religion and peace of other countries, who may think themselves bound to extinguish by fire and fagot the heresies to which we give the name of conversions, and quote our own example for it. Were the Pope, or his holy allies, to send in mission to us some thousands of Jesuit priests to convert us to their orthodoxy, I suspect that we should deem and treat it as a national aggression on our peace and faith." --Thomas Jefferson to Michael Megear, 1823. ME 15:434
Establishments of Religion Undermine Rights
"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah Moor, 1800.
"The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it's benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801. ME 10:237
"But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1810. ME 12:345
"[If] the nature of... government [were] a subordination of the civil to the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long years to come. Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of information, and they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been]. And there [the] clergy will always keep them if they can. [They] will follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierrepont Edwards, July 1801. (*)
"This doctrine ['that the condition of man cannot be ameliorated, that what has been must ever be, and that to secure ourselves where we are we must tread with awful reverence in the footsteps of our fathers'] is the genuine fruit of the alliance between Church and State, the tenants of which finding themselves but too well in their present condition, oppose all advances which might unmask their usurpations and monopolies of honors, wealth and power, and fear every change as endangering the comforts they now hold." --Thomas Jefferson: Report for University of Virginia, 1818.
"I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another." --Thomas Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 1799. ME 10:78
"The advocate of religious freedom is to expect neither peace nor forgiveness from [the clergy]." --Thomas Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, 1802. ME 10:305
"The clergy...believe that any portion of power confided to me [as President] will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion." --Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173
"Believing... that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281
"I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this [i.e., the purchase of an apparent geological or astronomical work] can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason. If [this] book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose." --Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:127
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813. ME 14:21
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." --Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:119
"I have been just reading the new constitution of Spain. One of its fundamental bases is expressed in these words: 'The Roman Catholic religion, the only true one, is, and always shall be, that of the Spanish nation. The government protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the exercise of any other whatever.' Now I wish this presented to those who question what [a bookseller] may sell or we may buy, with a request to strike out the words, 'Roman Catholic,' and to insert the denomination of their own religion. This would ascertain the code of dogmas which each wishes should domineer over the opinions of all others, and be taken, like the Spanish religion, under the 'protection of wise and just laws.' It would show to what they wish to reduce the liberty for which one generation has sacrificed life and happiness. It would present our boasted freedom of religion as a thing of theory only, and not of practice, as what would be a poor exchange for the theoretic thraldom, but practical freedom of Europe." --Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:128
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical." --Thomas Jefferson: Bill for Religious Freedom, 1779. Papers 2:545
The Benefits of Religious Freedom
"The law for religious freedom... [has] put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:400
"[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:67
"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor... otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief... All men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and... the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers 2:546
"Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:545
"We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:546
"The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:546
"A recollection of our former vassalage in religion and civil government will unite the zeal of every heart, and the energy of every hand, to preserve that independence in both which, under the favor of Heaven, a disinterested devotion to the public cause first achieved, and a disinterested sacrifice of private interests will now maintain." --Thomas Jefferson to Baltimore Baptists, 1808. ME 16:318
Religious Illegality
"The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788. ME 7:98
"If a sect arises whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play and reasons and laughs it out of doors without suffering the State to be troubled with it." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XVII, 1782. ME 2:224
"If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than as if it had happened in a fair or market." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:548
"It is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere [in the propagation of religious teachings] when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers 2:546
"Whatsoever is lawful in the Commonwealth or permitted to the subject in the ordinary way cannot be forbidden to him for religious uses; and whatsoever is prejudicial to the Commonwealth in their ordinary uses and, therefore, prohibited by the laws, ought not to be permitted to churches in their sacred rites. For instance, it is unlawful in the ordinary course of things or in a private house to murder a child; it should not be permitted any sect then to sacrifice children. It is ordinarily lawful (or temporarily lawful) to kill calves or lambs; they may, therefore, be religiously sacrificed. But if the good of the State required a temporary suspension of killing lambs, as during a siege, sacrifices of them may then be rightfully suspended also. This is the true extent of toleration." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Religion, 1776. Papers 1:547

In Response to the Well-Meaning 'Anonymous' Poster Who Felt the Need to Steer Me Towards Jesus

2010-09-04T19:16:00.012-05:00

Dear Sir or Madam,

Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough in my previous posting.

I am actually not a Muslim, though I was greeting my fellow Albanian-Americans who are Muslim on their holiday - Ramadan, and the upcoming Bayram. I myself was raised Orthodox Christian. Though I believe in Jesus, I do not believe that my belief in Jesus translates into a monopoly on 'the Truth'.

Who am I to judge another's path?

That's not what Jesus was about, and that's not what I am about. I respect your right to your opinion and have respect for those who themselves require strict adherence to organized religion, whether they be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Deist, etc. By all means, believe whatever you want.

But you can never convince me that because you are a Christian and Mr. Whomever is a Muslim his truth is any less valid than yours. Ever, ever, ever. That is not your province. That is not your responsibility.

For if you believe that your primary goal in this life is to bring the entire world to Christ Jesus, how are you in any way different from the average Jihadi and his attempts to bring the entire world to the Prophet Muhammad? It is simply not our place as mortal beings to issue edicts on who is a follower of Jesus or the Prophet Muhammad, Moses, the Buddha, etc. - and who is not.

If you truly believe in God, then stop playing Him and let Him do the brokering.

Indeed, if I believe anything at this point, I believe as my dear Grandma believed: that whatever religion a person practices is THE most private of private matters. My religion is between me, my God, and NOBODY else.

I was raised as an Orthodox Christian to conduct my daily affairs in accordance with my highest truth. My highest truth may not necessarily resemble your highest truth. I have never needed to slander others in the name of Jesus Christ, based upon my own narrow interpretation of any one of the world's great religious traditions, Islam included.

If Jesus showed us anything, he showed us He was bigger than that.

Islam contains 72 different sects. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, globally, Christianity has more than 33,820 denominations. I have heard plenty of Christian Americans say that they will not sleep until the USA becomes a Christian Republic and all those who disagree are either dead or banished forever. Especially gay folk such as myself.

To be sure, simply being a gay man in America has taught me much about the so-called 'Christian' brethren who have so much advice on how I should live my life. You can imagine how I feel when a pious, well-meaning soul such as yourself would approach me pretending to know what's best for me. With respect, dear Sir or Madam, you simply do not have that right and I shall never, ever relinquish it.

Moreover, you are bound by the US Constitution to refrain from attempting to do so.

Jesus didn't need your help 2,010 years ago. He doesn't need it now. Live and let live as Jesus did. "Do not judge others lest ye be judged".

I beg you not to regale me with your undoubtedly profound knowledge of and ability to quote holy scripture verbatim - whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish.... That is of no importance to me whatsoever. What matters to me most as a fellow American is that you fight as hard as I do to ensure that Church and State remain separate, that Muslim Americans are accorded the same rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, etc., etc. Americans are.

I can tend to my own immortal soul just fine, thank you.

And let's stop mixing apples with oranges this September, for once, shall we? Let's stop portraying 9/11 solely as a 'Clash of Civilizations' between Muslims and Christians, for to do so would be to ignore or deliberately obfuscate the open role of the 'Christian' evangelical right-wing cabal within the Beltway, throughout the US, and around the world whose criminal negligence and outright complicity, over decades, is directly traceable to the attacks.

To rail only about the 'Muslims' who carried out the 9/11 attacks exclusively would be to turn a blind eye to those 'Christians' within the Bush, Jr. administration that were responsible for fast-tracking the graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University into pivotal positions connected to National Security in the months, weeks and days leading up to September 11th, 2001. It would be to ignore these veritable 'Christian Taleban' graduates of (bizzarely enough) Robertson's authentic, nationally-accredited Christian madrassa, whose professed mission it is to dismantle the secular order of the United States of America and establish a Christian Republic which will one day, ostensibly by the grace of Jesus and 700 Club telethons galore, control the world.

It would be to willfully obscure the now well-documented role that the so-called 'C-Street Organization' and the 'Family' have played. The close collaboration of these holy rollers within the Reagan administration, Bush, Sr., Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush Jr. administration with some of the greatest captains of American and world finance and industry has created the clearest and most present danger to American democracy ever generated on American soil, at least on a par with the threat posed by Islamic extremists.

Together, it was essentially these parties, who, over decades, created and armed the Taleban, Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein when it was politically and economically expedient to do so. That it completely, utterly blew up in their face and has taken the entire free world hostage is of no import to these people, for they are as heartless and cruel and dangerous as the madmen who hijacked the planes and attacked our dignity as a people, as a Nation.

Let's stop at once this absurd polemic around an American Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan. Let's keep in mind that Plenty of Muslims were peacefully going about their business on 9/11, in the World Trade Center - and they didn't make it out of there alive either. Was their blood any less American? Were their mums, dads, sisters, brothers, cousins, grandparents, grandchildren any less destroyed inside? Any less afraid than all the rest of us were?

What about the Muslim police, firefighters and first responders who came to rescue their fellow Americans?

I am sick, sick, sick of seeing my fellow Albanian-Americans and others who are of Balkan and Middle-Eastern or South Asian descent being systematically abused and tortured for profit by Rupert Murdoch's disgraceful, rabble-rousing media empire. The so-called Tea Party Movement is nothing but the latest incarnation of the Birchers and its billionaire backers are some of the biggest, most diabolical hypocrites within the Republican Party. By the same token, I have no more time for so-called Democrats such as Harry Reid, who lacked the balls or the resolve to stand with Muslim Americans in this entirely manufactured, made-for-TV, pre-election, nativist shitstorm.

I know that millions of so-called Christians throughout America are aching to turn September 11th into a new crusade for Jesus. If it weren't for the clear vision, bravery and honesty of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, there would be pogroms in the streets. What does it tell you that the Jewish Mayor of New York, a city of some 9,000,000 souls, states publicly that this group of well-meaning American Muslims absolutely has the right and 100% of his support to build their community center?

I'll tell you what it tells me as a gay man who lives in Metro-NYC. It means Michael Bloomberg is a HERO. It means Mayor Bloomberg has GOT THE BALLS TO GET MY BACK.

It means there's clearly still HOPE FOR AMERICA. But don't take it from me. Please.

Take it from the Champ:

How about we stop this criminally insane nonsense? If we are as Christian as we profess to be, surely there is far too much work to be done to feed the hungry, house the homeless and heal the sick amongst us, as Jesus instructed us to do?

To being instruments of God's peace and love?

In so doing, nothing - absolutely NOTHING would preclude us from standing by the Champ and ALL our fellow peace-loving Americans of goodwill, who happen to be Muslim in this, their greatest hour of need.

Sincerely yours,

Davey

Hall me ty, qejf me ty - Maya

2010-09-04T09:31:00.010-05:00

Posted on YouTube by xxDJbexxx

Vëllezër dhe motra shqiptarë dhe amerikano-shqiptarë, dëshiroj t'ju them se, gjatë kësaj periudhe sidomos ksenofobike në Shtetët të Bashkuara, si dhe në kombët te perëndimin, as një sekondë nuk harroj që jam unë nip i emigrimit.

Ju premtoj që unë do te luftoj palodhshëm, në mënyrën time, për tolerancën, mirëkuptimin mes fevë dhe dinjitetin të të gjitha emigrantët në ShBA, me zërin më të forta. Eshtë pak, por me kalemin në dorë dhe me kompjuterin tim mbi trapezin, do të vazhdoj të shkruaj tek gazetat të ndryshme rreth meje, dhe mbi blogun tim për paqën botërore, me gjithë zemrën time.

Uroj sidomos, vellezer dhe motra shqiptare te fenë myslymane, kudo qe jeni, Gëzuar Ramazanin dhe Gëzuar Bajramin. Shëndet, lumturi dhe kësmet gjithmonë!

-----

Albanian and Albanian-American brothers and sisters, I want to tell you that during this especially xenophobic period in the United States and in nations of the West, I don’t forget for one second that I am a grandson of immigration.

I promise that I will fight tirelessly in my own way for tolerance, understanding between religions and the dignity of all immigrants in the U.S., with a loud voice. It's little, but with plume in hand and my computer on the table, I will continue to write to various newspapers and blog for world peace, with all my heart.

I wish especially Albanian brothers and sisters of the Muslim faith, wherever you are, Happy Ramadan and Happy Bayram. Health, happiness and luck always!

Ruby - Leih Beydary Keda / روبي - ليه بيداري كده

2010-09-04T07:35:00.003-05:00

Posted on YouTube by MelodyTVGroup

Work it girl. This video, obviously, is not going to have the same effect on me as it will on my hetero male friends. But I love this tune, and Ruby's cheek and waistline act as motivators for me to keep hitting the gym. Russ got me an amazing Roland keyboard a few years ago for Christmas, which features quarter tone settings, Balkan and Middle Eastern instruments, as well as the beats. As it happens, Ruby's Leih Beydary Keda is the Arabic demo song that Roland programmed into it. Sometimes I just turn the damned thing on, hit demo on my keyboard, and just dance to it because it's such a great rendition, incorporating just about all of the features contained in the instrument, all in one song. I love the times we live in, even if sometimes it seems like the entire world has lost its shit.

Nancy Ajram - Baladeyaty - Live / نانسى عجرم - بلدياتى - حفلة

2010-09-04T07:30:00.000-05:00

Posted on YouTube by MelodyTVGroup

Goats Rescued After Two Days on Railroad Bridge

2010-09-03T15:43:00.001-05:00

Iwan - 'Oul insha'Allah - إيوان - قول إنشالله

2010-09-02T13:09:00.001-05:00

Posted on YouTube by MelodyMusicGroup

Great song - great video. A loving couple grows older together, happily. 'Oul insha'Allah, by Lebanese singer, Iwan

When Kittens Do Yoga -'Stretch Kitteh'

2010-08-30T10:34:00.001-05:00

Posted on YouTube by dkapsner1

From Today's New York Times

2010-08-28T20:25:00.000-05:00

America Is Better Than This

By BOB HERBERT

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

Washington was on edge on the morning of Aug. 28, 1963. The day was sunny and very warm and Negroes, as we were called in those days, were coming into town by the tens of thousands. The sale of liquor was banned. Troops stood by to restore order if matters got out of control. President John F. Kennedy waited anxiously in the White House to see how the day would unfold.

It unfolded splendidly. The crowd for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” grew to some 250,000. Nearly a quarter of the marchers were white. They gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they were enthralled by the singing of Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez. The march was all about inclusion and the day seemed to swell with an extraordinary sense of camaraderie and good feeling.

The climax, of course, was Dr. King’s transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech. Jerald Podair, a professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, has called Aug. 28, 1963, “the most important single day in civil rights history.” This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck, a small man with a mean message, has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on Saturday at that very same Lincoln Memorial.

Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other elements of the right wing to portray Mr. Obama as somehow alien, a strange figure who is separate and apart from — outside of — ordinary American life. As the watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, Beck said of the president, “He chose to use the name, Barack, for a reason, to identify not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify, with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

In Beck’s view, President Obama is driven by a desire to settle “old racial scores” and his ultimate goal is “reparations” for black Americans. Abe Lincoln and Dr. King could only look on aghast at this clown.

Beck has been advertising his rally as nonpolitical, but its main speaker is Sarah Palin. She had her own low moment recently as a racial provocateur, publicly voicing her support for Laura Schlessinger, radio’s “Dr. Laura,” who went out of her way to humiliate a black caller by continuously using the n-word to make a point, even after the caller had made it clear that she was offended.

Palin’s advice to Schlessinger: “Don’t retreat — reload.”

There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.

But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained, hostile bombast. We’ve seen it so often. A little more than two weeks after the 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan and four young black girls were killed. And three months after the march, Jack Kennedy was assassinated.

My sincere advice to Beck, Palin and their followers is chill, baby, chill.

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust

2010-08-28T20:09:00.000-05:00

Posted on YouTube by CaptainJimKirk

Fabulous Bad Weather - The Church of Life After Shopping Chorus and the Not Buying It Band

2010-08-28T08:49:00.003-05:00

Reverend Billy with The Church of Life After Shopping Chorus and the Not Buying It Band performing "Fabulous Bad Weather" at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York on December 18, 2009.

The Church of Life After Shopping is directed by Savitri D. Bill Talen is Reverend Billy. The choir director is James Solomon Benn. Sopranos: Misun Choi, Carol Lester, Jessica Wiscovitch, Laura Newman, Lynn Biderman. Altos: Shilpa Narayan, Gina Figueroa, Damaris Williams, Pat Hornak Tenors: John Quilty, Travis Tench, Dixie Estes, Savitri D, Will Tucker Basses: Donald Gallagher, Gaylen Hamilton, Gregory Ostrom, Ben Dubin Thaler Bass: Nate Stevens Piano: Rick Ulfik.

The Church of Life After Shopping is a radical performance community dedicated to the earths recovery, fair and just economies, and the return of free expression to public space. The church pursues these goals through resisting Consumerism and Militarism and the corporations who profit from these systems. Amen!

Visit www.revbilly.com and www.MediaSanctuary.org for more information.

(Video and text courtesy of MediaSanctuary on YouTube)

An Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan? HELL YES!

2010-08-23T10:20:00.028-05:00

A Gay Albanian-American New Yorker Weighs In - Heavily

By Davey Joseph

I have two words which sum up my opinion on the tempest-in-a-teacup-du-jour regarding the Cordoba Center's plans for an Islamic Community Center in Lower Manhattan: HELL YES.

HELL YES to this Community Center, and to all the hopes, dreams and ambitions it represents to its members and to New York City.

HELL YES to the cultural and spiritual vibrancy it will contribute, and to the interfaith dialogue it has already initiated in the USA.

HELL YES to the civil rights of every single American Muslim of every single ethnic background and social class - whether practicing or non-practicing. The history of Muslims in the USA dates back to the slave trade, when Muslim slaves from West Africa were tortured and forcibly Christianized so they could better serve their 'Christian' masters in the American colonies.

First, my credentials for saying what I'm about to say, in the way I'm going to say it:

I'm a forty-something American of Albanian descent. Though raised an Orthodox Christian, as a teenager, I attended Albanian lessons at an Albanian-American Islamic Community Center. I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, and have friends from every conceivable ethnic, religious, social and vocational background. I have my own ideas about religion, and would consider myself to be agnostic at this point in time. I have friends of all ages, abilities, and sensibilities. I am the proud son of a US Army vet and a big supporter of our troops. My relatives have served with distinction in the military for generations now. In addition to my native English, I speak French, Spanish, Albanian, Greek, and a smattering of German, Danish, Persian, and Turkish. In almost any other country in the world, speaking languages is seen as a strength - something which is clearly in the national interest. In too many places throughout America, in 2010, multilingualism is seen as suspicious, subversive and corrupt. I live in metro-New York City. And as luck would have it, I'm also gay. So you know what that means.

That means I'm uniquely qualified to tell those of my compatriots who would wrap themselves in the American flag in order to deny other Americans their Constitutionally-protected right to build a community center to step off: it's my flag, too. You read that right Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Lazio, Harry Reid, and Newt Gingrich and all like cohorts: STEP. OFF.

This is America. I'm an American, and whether the American right-wing media recognize the Constitution or not, religious tests, racism and harassment such are we are experiencing in New York City - and around the US - are un-American in the extreme and a harbinger of a fascism the likes of which this country has never seen.

'The Muslims want to kiiiiiiiiill you!!!", the Tea Partiers and 'Christian' Taleban scream. "They want to impose Sharia on America! Shaaaaaaaaaaaria!!!"

To which I respond, "What's that?!! I can't hear you!! The 'God Hates Fags' protesters are drowning your voices out!!! Speak up!!!"

Oh, how soon these flag-waving patriots forget!

Haven 't some of the gravest threats to American democracy in the post WWII period come from within anyway? Remember that homegrown 'Christian' soldier Timothy McVeigh, the unofficial hero of virtually everything the Tea Partiers stand for? No? Well, here's something to jog your memory. God, mom, apple pie and...'death to America' anyone?:

'Christian' fundamentalists (read: white supremacists) had been talking about anthrax attacks on America's largest cities and referring to New York City as 'Ground Zero' for decades before the 9/11 attacks. To them, New York - and what it represents - has always been a kind of occidental Sodom and Gommorrah. The place you prayed your children would never be drawn to. A web of temptation and wickedness.

Aw shucks, let's just listen to what those sick old twats Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had to say to shell-shocked New Yorkers -and to the rest of America - about why 9/11 happened:

In their own words:

I've had epithets, spit and even a couple of bottles thrown at me by 'Christians' like those two dickheads my entire life.

Right here in the good ol' US of A, my partner and I have been publicly humiliated and denied service in restaurants. On our first official date, one guy even did doughnuts around us as we picnicked in a state park in New Jersey. 'Die fags!!!!', he roared, as he sped off, leaving us behind there, aghast, with our sandwiches and bottles of soda, as birds chirped and trees rocked gently in the breeze.

I have been let go from temp jobs because I am gay. Apparently to some that was the 'Christian' way to do business - never mind existing American State and Federal Labor Laws, let's fire fags for Jayzus!

I have been laughed at and talked about behind my back negatively by so many of these 'God-fearing', flag-lapel-pin-wearing 'Christians' because I am gay, I've lost count. (Every single one of them was shabbily dressed as well.)

I will never forget the time I tried to buy a few lemons in Boston's Haymarket Square, and was told, point-blank: "I don't sell to fags." I couldn't speak. I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me. It literally took me hours to process that encounter. He looked me right in the eye and he meant it. I did feel diminished. It wasn't what I was supposed to feel while shopping for groceries in the heart of the birthplace of the American Revolution.

I cannot give blood because I'm gay, and to the 'Christian' Taleban, I'm not human, and I am considered to be more at risk for transmitting HIV to the general population at large. Because as we all know, the general 'all-hetero-all-the-time' population at large always wears condoms all the time, and only has sex for the purpose of procreation. Especially God-fearing heterosexual crack whores, who produce thousands of unwanted babies.

I cannot marry because I'm gay, though my relationship has already far outlasted many marriages in the states most popular with Tea Partiers and Rush Limbaugh. Last time I checked, that useless, fat tub of shit was on his fourth marriage.

As a gay man, I'm perceived by a large swath of evolution-denying, home-schooled, God-fearing 'Christian' Americans as the number one threat to the social order. The number one threat!!!! But I can't find my keys, and I left my cell phone in a restaurant last night. Again!

If you don't know what can happen when the mass media demonize, threaten and slander a particularly vulnerable minority, here's a tickler:

In a taxi the other day, on 9th Avenue, I had a chat with my driver, an amiable man born in Pakistan who told me that pretty much every Muslim cabbie he knew loved gay customers the most. According to him, word was out at the local mosque that gay men were the most friendly, polite customers (and most likely to be the best tippers).

I told the driver I was 1000% behind him being Muslim in America and building himself a brand new community center - no matter where he wanted to build it. He replied that he was 1000% in support of me as a gay man living my life freely in New York City - or anywhere else I wanted.

That's enlightenment.

That's New York.

That's the kind of Muslims I grew up with. Some of my closest, dearest friends and neighbors are from Muslim family backgrounds. They are now and ever shall be an integral part of my American family of choice. Their fight for dignity, respect and protection as American citizens is my fight for dignity, respect and protection as an American citizen.

Pure and simple.

Remember America? Bob T. Guevara does, and his little ditty puts pretty much everything into stark perspective. Lest we forget.... Enjoy!:

How Fox Betrayed Petraeus (From today's New York Times)

2010-08-21T22:09:00.000-05:00

By FRANK RICH

THE “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the “ground zero mosque” was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad — a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated — but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. AsJeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun. Pearl’s father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soonthe rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.

The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a “stab in the heart” of Americans who “still have that lingering pain from 9/11.” But her only previous engagement with the 9/11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G.O.P. ticket. (She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain’s just-announced “suspension” of their campaign.) Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik, who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration. As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us, such was Kerik’s previous reverence for the burial ground of 9/11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site (and designated for recovery workers) for an extramarital affair.

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it’s an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing. Existing or proposed American mosques hundreds and even thousands of miles from ground zero, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to California, are now under siege.

After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

In the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent). Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives. The hawks will have to make the case that American troops should make the ultimate sacrifice to build a Nazi — Afghan, I mean — nation and that economically depressed taxpayers should keep paying for it. Good luck with that.

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

It’s poignant, really. Even as America’s most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.

Yara - Shefto Mn Be'eid / يارا - شفتو من بعيد

2010-08-04T21:05:00.001-05:00

Posted on YouTube by Melody Music Group

Walid Toufic - Ma Fi Shay Byetgayar / وليد توفيق - ما فى شى بيتغير

2010-08-04T21:00:00.000-05:00

Statement of Thanks from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on the LPC Vote to Forego Designation of 45 Park Place as NYC Landmark

2010-08-04T20:15:00.001-05:00

Statement of Thanks from Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf on the LPC Vote to Forego Designation of 45 Park Place as NYC Landmark

I am pleased to learn that the Landmarks Commission has concluded that 45 Park Place will not be designated a landmarked site. I am very grateful to Chairman Robert Tierney and his colleagues for their careful and thoughtful consideration.

I am also deeply grateful to our local elected officials, Scott Stringer, Margaret Chin, Daniel Squadron, Andrew Cuomo, David Paterson, and Michael Bloomberg. Our faith community is indebted to them, and to our local community board, for their commitment to the democratic and constitutional ideals we all hold dear and which the community center we hope to create on the site will honor. We believe that Park51 will become a landmark in New York City’s cultural, social and educational life, a community center to promote the American values we all aspire towards and to realize a better city for all.

My testimony, submitted to the Commission earlier this month, sets forth my hopes and vision for the community center we would like to see built at 45 Park Place. In just over a week, Muslim New Yorkers will join friends of other faiths in welcoming the holy month of Ramadan. Muslims around the world dedicate this month to charity, service and community, ideals which I personally hold dear and which Park51 will move forward to realize.

Park 51 will be a home for all people who are yearning for understanding and healing, peace, collaboration, and interdependence. We are more determined than ever to take this opportunity, which we also see as a responsibility to our community and to our neighbors in Lower Manhattan. We are creating a new space where fresh stories of cooperation and service will reflect the living vibrancy of inter-connected communities.

It is our hope that, during this holy month, New Yorkers and Americans from all walks of life will join us in realizing our hopes and dreams for peace and happiness. The support of our partners, elected officials and friends has made this moment possible. Let us help build something that all New Yorkers - and all Americans - will be proud of.

Additionally, we appreciate the support received from the following organizations:
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, J Street, The Arab American Family Support Center, Auburn Seminary, American Jewish Committee, Cause New York, Chautauqua Institute, Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, Faith House Manhattan, Friends of the Arava Institute, Interfaith Youth Core, Intersections, Interfaith Center of New York, The Interfaith Alliance, Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, Lutheran Seafarers and International House, New York Buddhist Church, Odyssey, New Seminary, Out of Cordoba – Averros and Miamonides, NY Interfaith Disaster, One Voice, One Spirit, St. Bartholomew's Church, Same Difference Interfaith Alliance, The Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, Tanenbaum Center, The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, Trinity Wall Church, The Healing of the Nations Foundation, The Migration Policy Institute, Union Theological Seminary, St. Peters Church, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, UJA Federation of New York.

VICTORY: Islamic Center Approved! American Freedom of Religion and Expression Prevails in NYC - Right on, J-Street, and Congratulations Mr. Mayor!!!!

2010-08-04T20:07:00.002-05:00

Second Breakfast

2010-07-23T21:42:00.002-05:00

Posted on YouTube by Frodrick VFS